Monday, April 2, 2018

In the time leading up to the last presidential election I
often remarked on the manliness factor. Clearly, Donald Trump promoted himself
as more manly than the other candidates. He certainly presented himself as more
manly than Hillary Clinton… though, in the end, it was a close call. Trump by a
nose… so to speak.

As I noted, Trump’s vulgar, bare-knuckled version of
manliness was certainly not the only kind. Trump was not Eisenhower or
MacArthur.

Yet, as president, however, Trump has surrounded himself
with many traditionally manly men, from John Kelly to James Mattis. We
would add Rex Tillerson and H. R. McMaster, men of unimpeachable manliness, but
who seemed, nonetheless, not to have been up to their jobs.

Harvard Prof. Harvey Mansfield explains in a Wall Street
Journal interview that there are several kinds of manliness. Among them are the
gentleman. By definition, the gentleman is proper and courteous, genteel and
respectful. He is neither a bully nor a thug. He did not take his marching
orders from Friedrich Nietzsche.

And yet, Mansfield continues, no one embodied aristocratic
gentility more than the Bushes, father and son. Unfortunately, the first went
back on his sacred vow not to raise taxes. And if anything denotes
manliness, it is the willingness to keep one’s word, come what may.

Bush the younger seemed to be too much the frat boy and not
enough the grown up. He seemed too conciliatory and even weak when faced with
the onslaught of Democratic criticism. You might say that the Golden Rule
precluded his fighting back against the attacks, but still, he appeared more to
be a punching bag than a fearless leader. In so doing he discredited WASP
gentility.

One might say that Barack Obama was genteel, at least in his
own way, but he consistently projected weakness on the world stage. And, when
the time came to stand tall and proud, to represent America in the world stage,
to be our fearless champion, he walked away. He did not want to compete as the
alpha male, but to exercise what he would have called moral leadership. He
wanted to plant his flag on the moral high ground. He talked American down,
apologized for a nation of war criminals and manifested a patriotism
deficiency.

People around the world cheered. Yet, world leaders,
considerably more savvy about these matters, saw that occupying the moral high
ground merely made you a target. And they saw that Obama’s weakness left the
role of alpha male open, up for the taking. Around the world today we are
seeing different male leaders, from Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping, even including
Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Narendra Modi… vying to occupy the empty place of the
world’s alpha male.

Clearly, Donald Trump understands the competition and is
engaging it.

His detractors vacillate between hysterical rants about how
he is going to provoke a nuclear war and equally hysterical rants about how he
is not being tough enough on Russia. Even today, when Trump is acting far more
forcefully against Russian interests than Obama did, the commentariat is
seriously whining that his words are not sufficiently insulting.

You will note that, when it comes to the competition to be
alpha male, Western European leaders are not in the game. Theresa May and
Angela Merkel have shown themselves to be weak leaders. Emmanuel Macron seems
to be doing a good job for France, but he exudes youth… and besides, he married
his mother. Scandinavian nations are completely feminized, run by feminists,
overrun by invading Muslim refugees. They are sitting on the sidelines watching
the competition for alpha maledom.

Mansfield offers a succinct and on-point analysis of the
Obama attitude toward manliness:

In Mr.
Mansfield’s view, Mr. Trump’s success wasn’t a racial reaction to President
Obama as much as a backlash in favor of masculinity. Mr. Obama “had the
scolding demeanor of a schoolmarm—very much, I think, following the temper of
today’s feminists. It’s all a matter of correcting the behavior of misbehaving
juveniles, and of condescension.” Here, he checks himself, allowing that this
observation “is a little unfair to Obama, because some of his speeches were pretty
good, and he did have a vision of America and the way America ought to be.” But
it was not an America that “throws its weight around. That’s precisely what he
wanted to avoid. So, in his foreign policy, and in his domestic role as
condescender-in-chief, he showed his hostility to manliness.”

Obama ceded worldly leadership to more manly men, so his
supporters are up in arms against Trump’s more vulgar version of manliness.
Mansfield believes that Trump is a reaction to the gender neutering that has
been going on in America for lo these many years.

He
agrees that there’s a connection between the campaign for gender-neutrality in
the U.S.—seeking, as he sees it, to erase all differences between the sexes—and
the “hunger” that made Mr. Trump’s political rise possible.

I would offer a slightly different analysis here. America’s
schools, from elementary schools to universities, have set about to diminish
manliness, to beat down boys and men in favor of girls and women. While they
are in school the males can do nothing more than acquiesce. When they are out
of school many of them rebel against their feminist schoolmarms by harassing
and abusing women. The current wave of sexual harassment did not come from the
moon. It is a reaction to the attitude toward boys and men that has been on the
march in school.

In a matriarchal culture like the school system, a
gentlemanly approach to manliness seems weak. Thus, men resort to more
dramatic, more overt, even more vulgar versions of masculinity, the better to
repudiate the posture of weakness they were forced to assume in
school.

Mansfield points out that in America’s universities,
manliness has become taboo. These schools are in the business of producing what
Arnold Schwarznegger famously called “girly men.” Mansfield adds that America’s
bureaucracy, its deep state is filled with such girly men… and that Trump is
trying to expunge them. Consider James Comey, Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok …
where would you locate them on the manliness scale.

Now in
Washington there has been “a replacement of the people who reflect the values
of American universities, where manliness is taboo.”

Of course the deep state and progressive Democrats are
fighting back against Trump’s vulgar manliness. And yet, unmanly leaders who
happily served one of our least manly presidents want to assert their manliness
by overthrowing America’s current alpha male. While they denounce Trump as a
vulgar hater, they manifest complete vulgarity and uncontrollable hatred.

Mansfield sees it in the #MeToo movement:

The
movement “represents a particular critique of Trump for his sexual harassment,
or at least his lamentable sexual reputation. It’s against the aggressive male,
the presumptuous male, the male who hasn’t had his ‘consciousness raised’
sufficiently. That’s Trump, and the #MeToo campaign sees him as the embodiment
of everything male they don’t like, and want to oppose.”

Currently, the war against men also manifests itself as a
children’s crusade against guns. It’s like the anti-war movement—which was the
precipitant for the anti-male bias.

You know, as I know, that the fault for the Parkland
shooting lay with government agencies. From the FBI to the local sheriff to
state authorities to the Obama administration policy of trying to keep disruptive
children in school… put them all together and you produce Nikolas Cruz. A
minimal intervention, a couple of days of involuntary commitment, would have prevented
him from buying a gun.

And yet, all of the government officials were displaying
empathy. They were doing exactly what our man-hating therapy culture
prescribed. They were making nice to a boy who was out-of-control and who was
threatening violence. Like Barack Obama’s approach to Islamist terrorism—look weak
and apologetic, blame ourselves— government officials chose not intervene
forcefully to prevent the massacre.

When it was over none of them took responsibility for their
failures. They blamed the NRA.

Now, bands of junior Red Guards have joined forces to declare
war on guns… and of course on toxic masculinity. They have learned their
lessons well. They are a new vanguard in the war on men and boys.

After all, guns are a guy thing. They are a quintessentially
guy thing. In a culture that admires and supports military power, taking guns
away signifies an effort to weaken the nation. These children are making a
dramatic display of impotent rage.

12 comments:

Actually, the term "girly man" was first coined by Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon in their "Pumping Up With Hans & Franz" skits on Saturday Night Live. Awnuld just picked up on it afterward, since it was clear that D & K were caricaturing him.

"Even today, when Trump is acting far more forcefully against Russian interests than Obama did, the commentariat is seriously whining that his words are not sufficiently insulting." The commentariat is NOT manly. They don't even know the meaning of "manly".

Stuart - you could elaborate , perhaps, that the kindergarten to university matriarchy seems not to comprehend honor or traditional character: the inability to accept responsibility and admit error (the gov't agencies liabilities in FL )...the quickness to blame an abstraction or system ( the,in my opionion, astro-turfed and pre-fabbed "Childrens' Crusade").

I recall reading Obama was distinctly uncomfortable in the company of career military men in the course of his tour of duty in the White House.

There are several psych profile books on Obama.One suggested Obama Jr. discovered Obama Sr.had argued extensively with Stanley Ann Dunham regarding his preference that the child be aborted.

I agree with everything you say here but just wonder what you mean by this : "It’s like the anti-war movement—which was the precipitant for the anti-male bias." The anti Vietnam War movement was, I think, very different from the later anti Afghan/Iraq war movements which seemed to be led mainly by women wearing pink who protested, not so much the politics of those wars as the very idea fighting itself (as though everything could be nicely settled over tea). OTOH, yes, there was the post-Nam Kerry, talking of men --almost in general-- as brutal Genghis Kahns, but that still didn't seem to precipitate the contemporary widespread notion of "toxic masculinity." Anyway, to repeat: what did you have in mind by that?

Anti-war was anti-men... being as war is a distinctly male activity. During the Vietnam era only men fought in wars. The anti-war movement promoted feminine values, peace and love, drugs and music. Once the ended badly and once we seemed to have lost to a bunch of pajama-clad guerrillas american manliness took a near-fatal hit.